St. Landry democrat. (Opelousas, La.) 1878-1894, 1887-07-14

| fulCul % VI uCo pdLl it" ltS ut y otti 9"'tt-
and these whom you have destroyed will
! come around to torment you and to pour
hotter Goals of fury upon your head, and
rejoice eternally in the cutlery Of your
pain and the howl of your damnation.
God shall wound the hairy scalp of him thJt
| goeth on il his trespasses.
| Oh, stand off from that Why will
you go sounding your way amid the reefs
| and warning buoys, when there is such q
| vast ocean in which you may voyage, all
sail set!
There is one other thing l shall say this
morning before leave you, whether YOU
want to hear it or not Tn at Is, that | con-
| slider the lascivious rhetorical litera ture
| of the day as most tremendous for ruin.
There is no one who can like good pict-
ures better than do. The quickest and
most condensed way Of impressing the
public mind is by pictures. What the
painter does by his brush for few favor
ties the engraver does by his knife for the
million. What the author accomplishes
by fifty pages the artist does by a flash.
| The best part of painting that costs Sl0,-
COO you may buy for ten cents. Fine
paintings belong to the arlstocracy of art.
Engravings belong to the democracy Of
art. You do well to gather good pictures
in you homes. Spread them before your
children after the tea hour is past
and the evening circle is gathered.
| Throw them on the invalids couch.
StreW them through the rail train to
| cheer the traveller on his journey. Tack
them on the wall of the nursery. Gather
| them in albums and portfolios. God
| speed the good pictures on their way
with ministries Of knowledge ard mercy
But what shall l say of the pros ttution
of this art to purposes of iniq uity: These
! death warrants of the soul are at every
street corner They smte the vision of
the young man with pollution. Many a
young man buying copy has bought his
eternal discontinue. There may be
enough poison in one bad picture to pois-
on one soul, and that soul may poison ten,
and ten fifty, and the fifty hundreds,
and the hundreds thousands, until
nothing but the measuring line of eterni-
| ty can tell the height, and depth and
| ghas illness, and horror of the great IN
doing. The work of death that the wick
| ed author does in a whole book the bad
engraver may do on half side Of picto-
| rial.
Under the guise ofpure mirth the young
| man buys one of these sheets He unrolls
it before his comrades amid roars of
|
| the result may perhaps be seen in the
blasted ina glnations of those who saw it.
The Queen of Death holds a banquet every
night, and these periodicals are the
printed invitations to her guests. Alas,
| that the far brow of American art should
| be blotched with this plague spot, and
that philanthropists, bothering them
selves about smaller evils, should lift up
| no united and vehement voice against this
| great calamity.
Young man, buy not this moral strych-
] nine for your soul. Pick not up this nest
| of coiled adders for your pocket. Patron
| ize no newsstand that keeps them. Have
your room bright with good engravings.
| but for these outrageous pictorials have
| not one wall, not one bureau, not one
pocket. A man is no better than the pict-
| ure he loves to look at. If your eyes are
not pure, your heart can not be. At a
newsstand one can guess the character of
| a man by the kind of pictorial he pur.
| chases. When the devil fails to get man
| to read a bad book, he metimes succeeds
| in getting him to look at bad picture.
When Satan goes a-fishing he does not
| care whether it is long line or a short
line, if he OILY draws his victim in. Be
| ware of lascivious pictorials, young man.
| in the name of Almighty God l charge
you.
If have this morning successfully LAID
| down any principles by which you may
| judge in regard to books and newspapers.
| then I have done something which shall
| not be ashamed of on the day which shall
| try every mans work, of what sort it is.
| Cherish good books and newspapers.
| Beware of the bad ones. The column
may save your soul; one paragraph may
| ruin it. Benjamin Franklin said that the
reading of Cotton Mather's essay on DO
| ing Good'' nodded his entire life. The
assassin of Lord Russell declared that he
| was led into crime by reading one vivid
| romance. The consecrated John Angel
James, than whom England never pro-
| duced a better man, declared in his
| old days that he had never yet got over
| the evil effects of having for fifteen min
| utes once read bad book. But l need
| not go so far off I could come near home
and tell you of something that occurred in
my college days. I could tell you of Il
| comrade that was great noble
| and generous. He was studying for an
| honorable profession, but he had an in
| fidel book in his trunk, and he said to me
| one day:
''De Witt, would you like to read it''
said: eyes, l would" | took the
book and read it only for few minutes.
was really startled with what l saw
there, and handed the book back to HIM
and said:
| ssYou had better destroy that book"
No, he kept it. He read it. He re-read
1t. After awhile he gave up religion as
myth. He gave up God as a nonenity.
He gave up the Bible as fable He gave
up the Church of Christ as useless in
stitution. He gave up good morals as be-
ing unnecessarily stringent. Ihave heard
of him but twice in many years. The
time before the last heard of HIM he was
a confirmed inebriate. The last heard
of him he was coming out of an insane
asylum-in body, mind and soul an awful
| wreck I believe that one infdel book